On the one hand, I’ve never really understood all the whoop-de-doo about bacon, all the facebook memes fetishizing it as the sacred food of the slacker set. It’s O.K. I’ll eat it, and enjoy it. It’s far from my favorite form of meat. And the main advantage of hot dogs is that they are often instantly available at locations where you happen to be, and they don’t cost much. So, it probably would not be a great sacrifice for me to cut down on bacon and hot dogs.

And I don’t doubt the science. If you eat fat, you get fat, and bacon is mostly fat. Like with hot dogs, I never actually suspected they were healthy. Yet, doing a quick, little thought experiment of my own, I come up with a slightly different result. I think of all the seriously old people I know (anybody who’s more than a little bit older than me is seriously old) and most of them eat bacon. A lot of them drink beer, too.

So, I think we should take these new findings with a grain of salt. Oh, wait a minute. Salt’s bad, too.